The Sack of King's Landing

Not a battle so much as a demonstration of what Tywin Lannister does when the door is opened for him.

Why it came to this

Tywin Lannister spent almost the entirety of RobertÔÇÖs Rebellion doing nothing. He had served Aerys II as Hand for twenty years, had been humiliated by him repeatedly and publicly, and had gone home to Casterly Rock with the west intact and unspent. When the banners went up he did not answer the crownÔÇÖs summons and did not join the rebels either. He mustered, sat on his hands, and waited for somebody to win. It was cold, disloyal and completely correct, and it is the clearest single illustration of how the man thought.

After the Trident the answer was obvious. The royal army was destroyed, the rebel host was marching south, and the capital had a mad king, a garrison, a Kingsguard and no means whatever of stopping what was coming. At that point Tywin marched ÔÇö not to the rebelsÔÇÖ camp to join them, which would have made him one lord among four, but to the gates of KingÔÇÖs Landing, which he could reach first.

Aerys had made himself impossible to defend even by people who wanted to. In the last months he had installed pyromancers in place of counsellors, elevated a guild alchemist to the office of Hand, and had wildfire caches placed beneath the sept, the guildhalls, the stables, the streets and the Red Keep itself ÔÇö hundreds of jars of it, laid over months, on the understanding that if he could not hold the city nobody would have it. He had also convinced himself, against all recent evidence, that the great houses would ultimately come to heel.

So when a western host appeared beneath the walls professing loyalty to the crown, the question put before the king was whether to open the gates. His small council was divided; one voice of long standing and considerable authority argued strongly that Lord Tywin had come as a friend and should be admitted. The king took that advice. There is a case that this was the single most consequential piece of counsel given in the entire century.

The ground and the hosts

KingÔÇÖs Landing in 283 was a walled city of half a million people, built up against itself, with narrow streets, no citadel worth the name apart from the Red Keep, and a population that had spent a year hearing about what was coming. Its defensibility on paper was decent ÔÇö high walls, seven gates, the river at its back. Its actual defensibility was nil, because a city is only as strong as the field army that relieves it, and there was no longer a field army anywhere south of the Trident.

The garrison was the City Watch, a body of men whose function is policing rather than war, and whatever household troops remained in the Red Keep. Several of the Kingsguard were dead on the Trident or dispatched elsewhere on the kingÔÇÖs errands. What was left in the keep was a handful of sworn shields, a household, a queen, a pregnant princess-in-law with two small children, and a king who had gone somewhere his own council could not follow.

Outside was a full western host, unbloodied, well provisioned, under the most methodical commander in Westeros, with two subordinates chosen for the specific work he had in mind. Ser Gregor Clegane and Ser Amory Lorch were not distinguished soldiers. They were instruments, and Tywin had a long-standing practice of keeping instruments of that kind on his books precisely so that certain orders would never need to be written down.

There was one other feature of the terrain that neither side counted: the wildfire. Somewhere under the streets the city was carrying enough of it to erase itself, placed by men who answered directly to the king and to nobody else.

How it was fought

It was not fought. That is the point of it. The gates opened, the host came in as friends, and the sack began within the hour ÔÇö which means the order had been given before a single man passed the wall, and that everybody in that column knew what they were entering the city to do.

The first phase was the standard grammar of a sack, done efficiently: the gates secured from the inside, the Watch overwhelmed or bought or simply irrelevant, the main routes taken, and then the men turned loose on the streets. KingÔÇÖs Landing had not been sacked in living memory and had no procedure for it. The killing and the burning and the rest of it ran through the poorer districts first and worst, as it always does, and continued through most of a day and a night.

The second phase was happening simultaneously and was the actual operation. A body of picked men went straight for the Red Keep, and they were not there to loot it. TywinÔÇÖs purpose in reaching the city before the rebels was to arrive with a gift that could not be refused ÔÇö proof, delivered in person, that the west had ended the Targaryen line rather than merely joined the winning side late. That required specific people, and it required them to be past saving before anybody with authority could object.

Meanwhile, in the throne room, the king was giving the order he had been preparing for months. The wildfire caches were to be lit ÔÇö the whole city, with the enemy inside it and everyone else too. Aerys had told himself a story in which he rose from the ashes as something other than a man. The order went to the pyromancer he had made his Hand, and it was never carried out, because one of the men standing in that room as the kingÔÇÖs sworn protector made a decision about what his oath was actually for, and went after the alchemist rather than the enemy at the gate. Half a million people are alive in the following decades because of it, and not one of them ever knew.

The third phase was arrival and management. Eddard Stark came down the kingsroad with the rebel host and found the city already taken, the sack in progress or just concluding, and a Lannister in possession of the Red Keep. What was presented to Robert Baratheon shortly afterwards, when he came up, were bodies wrapped in crimson cloaks and laid at the foot of the throne as an act of homage ÔÇö a gesture calculated to make refusal impossible, because refusing it would mean saying out loud that the new king found the deaths inconvenient.

Robert accepted. That decision, made in a room full of exhausted men within hours of the end of a war, poisoned the next twenty years. Ned Stark did not accept it, said so, and the two of them quarrelled so badly that he rode out of the city and out of the friendship, south, on business of his own.

What it cost

The city itself paid most of the bill and is the part least written about. Thousands of ordinary people were killed in a sack that served no military purpose whatever, since the city was not resisting. Whole districts were burned. Every account of the Sack of KingÔÇÖs Landing that dwells on the Red Keep is, in a small way, doing the thing Tywin wanted done, which is treating the deaths of three people as the story and the deaths of thousands as weather.

The Targaryen presence in the capital was extinguished ÔÇö the king, the royal household, and the heirÔÇÖs wife and children. The dynastyÔÇÖs only remaining members were a boy and an unborn child on Dragonstone, got out to sea ahead of the rebels by loyal servants in the last days.

House Lannister was made by it, in the most literal sense. Tywin had spent the whole war conserving his strength and cashed the entire investment in one afternoon: a royal pardon, a place at the centre of the new regime, and within a year a marriage that put his daughter on the throne beside the new king. He bought the next twenty years of Lannister supremacy at the price of a reputation he had never much wanted anyway.

The man ruined by it was one of the men who did the right thing. The knight who stopped the wildfire was seen only as the one who broke his oath, and he never explained himself to anyone with the standing to hear it. He carried the name he was given at seventeen for the rest of his career, and it is the storyÔÇÖs cleanest demonstration that a reputation is made by what is convenient to believe rather than by what happened.

What it changed

It made RobertÔÇÖs reign possible and it made it rotten from the foundation. The new king took the throne with the deaths of children on the account of one of his own great lords and chose not to pursue it, which meant the regime began with an unpunished crime that everybody knew about. Dorne never accepted it, never forgot it, and spent the following two decades in a condition of formal loyalty and actual estrangement.

It also created, in a single day, most of the personal grudges that the main saga runs on. The MartellsÔÇÖ grievance, the StarksÔÇÖ mistrust of the Lannisters, the position of the man who stopped the wildfire, the surviving Targaryens across the narrow sea raised on an account of this day ÔÇö all of it starts here. A very large proportion of the deaths in the War of the Five Kings, sixteen years later, can be traced back through somebodyÔÇÖs memory of the sack.

And it established the operating principle of the new order, which was that overwhelming force applied without warning to people who trust you is effective, cheap and survivable. Others were watching, and others took the lesson. Two decades later a brideÔÇÖs family will apply it at a wedding, and the man who taught it will be pleased with them.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Aerys II Targaryen was killed in the throne room by Ser Jaime Lannister of his own Kingsguard, after Jaime had first killed the pyromancer carrying the order to fire the wildfire caches. Jaime was found sitting on the Iron Throne when the rebels arrived, which is the image everybody kept, and he was called Kingslayer for the rest of his life by people who never learned what the alternative had been.

Princess Elia Martell of Dorne was raped and murdered in the Red Keep by Ser Gregor Clegane, who had already killed her infant son Aegon. Her daughter Rhaenys, a small girl, was found hiding and stabbed to death by Ser Amory Lorch. Neither man was ever charged. The bodies were wrapped in Lannister crimson and presented to Robert Baratheon, who let it pass. Doran and Oberyn Martell did not, and the debt they opened that day is called in, at length and at great cost, two decades later.

Queen Rhaella and Prince Viserys had been sent to Dragonstone before the end. Rhaella died there in childbed during a storm, bearing a daughter. The two surviving children were taken across the narrow sea by a handful of loyalists, and the younger of them spent her childhood being told a version of this day.

Grand Maester Pycelle, who had urged the king to open the gates, kept his chain and his seat on the small council for another sixteen years, and was very old and very useful to the same family for all of them.